Tag Archives: results

Hi everyone reading our blog, the SkyNest Summer Factory is now done for. The office lights have been closed, and for us SkyNesters it brings up a whole new exciting challenge. The Summer Factory was a resounding success this year. This post is meant to give you a bit of a showcase of what was achieved and how we will continue here at SkyNest. Without further ado, I would like to present to you some of the achievements made this summer:

A truckload of work completed

First up, I would like to present to you some random statistic that have been aggregated from our production environment and from a final survey posed to the factory participants.

The students implemented a debian packaging distribution system for FreeNest, which is a resounding departure from the old virtual machine based distribution system. Once FreeNest is released, anyone should be able to install FreeNest on any Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server. It also gives resounding flexibility to installations, allowing users to customize their FreeNests component by component. Installing FreeNest in the future will be as easy as writing the following command in your terminal:

The summer factory designed and implemented a process that makes deploying new packages easily. They created a tool script that allows a developer to easily build packages out of their source code repositories. When a developer wants to release a new package version for a particular component, it is as easy as pushing their changes to a remote repository. From there, an automated build engine takes charge. The engine ( Jenkins for those who are interested) builds and publishes the packages on need-to-do basis. This makes pushing new releases very fast, currently the process takes about 5 minutes from commit to published package.

Team Board

An awesome new tool that I’m really excited about. The team board was created by the Talented Feature Team 1. It is a virtual whiteboard with a twist: It scales forever in 3D space, meaning you have a neverending customizable idea board, that you can zoom in and out on a whim. This tool can be used to create some really really cool stuff, like fractal backlogs, process mapping, brainstorming and so on. It will be released with FreeNest 1.4

Control Panel

Another excellent new feature was created by our Feature Team 2, the central control panel for all FreeNest tools. This nifty little tool is inspired by the Settings application in iDevices, and in the future will contain all necessary configuration files for a FreeNest server. You can fully administer your FreeNest from one location, making setting up your environment a real breeze.

Git Admin Tools

Feature Team 1 also implemented a control layer for the Git DVCS. The Git admin tools is a section found under the Control panel. It allows an admin to easily create, destroy and manage git repositories. It also gives powerful tools for managing and grouping users and access rights on a repository or group privilege basis. It also gives users self-administering rights by allowing them to send their own SSH keys to the system, without interfering with the admin.

FreeNest.org

The talented User Experience team did a wonderful job in creating a new layout and content for the brand new freenest.org. The site will be unpublished for a while, but a glimpse of the new look and feel can already be previewed at the link in the header

Brand Book and design guidelines

The UX team also worked heavily on creating the FreeNest brand and feel. They came up with an extensive collection of marketing materials and a brand book. Additionally they focused on producing good quality design guidelines for FreeNest developers, making it easy for people to create and extend new tools.

FreeNest Face lift (Unified UX)

The UX team also did extensive work of unifying the user interfaces and experiences across the FreeNest system. They created custom layout files for more than 15 tools, and implemented them. The face lift will be a prominent part of the new FreeNest 1.4 release.

Junk Cloud API tool

The Awesome Cloud team, in addition to building and re-building the physical infrastructure, also built up a command line client for our Junk Cloud. Now users can launch new FreeNest server in less than 5 minutes with a single command line command. The tool allows customising the instance that will be launched, and can also be used on virtually any vm that requires package management on boot. The cloudnest api tool can be deployed also with minimal changes to any OpenStack based compute cloud.

Automated testing toolchain

Finally, one of our Thesis workers created a toolchain for our Test Management tool. It allows developers to create testing suites for their components, and to attach Robot Framework Scripts to these cases. The scripts tell an automated testing robot how to execute the test case. When a test suite is complete, a developer only needs to press one button in our Test Management Tool (testlink), and a robot tester is deployed to run the cases. The results of the tests are then returned to the test planner for future consideration.

This has only been a glimpse and surface scratch of what we achieved during this summer. Thanks to all of our wonderful students for this summer, I did not rue missing out on a summer vacation one bit!

This however is not the end of this blog. In fact, the SkyNest Factory will get a sequel faster than you would expect! We are announcing the SkyNest Fall Factory 2012, made out of international students. Stay tuned for more information. One thing is for sure, it’s going to be a busy fall as well!

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